Backup your WordPress website

Wordpress - 2nd Dec 2016

Read this great article about backing up and securing your website files as a precaution:

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on
Your Host to Backup Your Site

This is something I see a lot:

Blogger to Host: “Oh no, my site has been hacked! Can you please restore from a backup?”

Host: “What backup?”

I saw this reported on Facebook as recently as like a week ago.

Web hosts are notoriously shit for not backing up, even when they say they will. This is usually seen with budget hosts in the $5 – $10/month range.

No matter what your backup solution is, whether it’s with your host or a plugin or a third party service, you should always do one important thing:

Never assume your backups are being done without checking to make sure they are.

What does that mean?

– Download your backups.
– Keep them in a place that YOU control and have access to.
– Check them to make sure they’re actually working and contain the data they should be backing up.
– Don’t let someone else be completely in control without you being able to confirm it’s happening.

Better to be safe than sorry, right?

At the very least, you can hop over to Tools > Export and download your WordPress XML file. This isn’t a perfect backup, but it will at least save some of the most important bits like posts, comments, and pages.

Have you ever tried to get a backup from a host who said they were backing up for you, just to find out they didn’t have them?